Limits On The Study Of The Mind Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 136, 139):

Embodiment imposes ineluctable limits. The wish to go beyond these limits creates contradiction, fantasy, and a mystique that makes the study of the mind especially challenging, for after a certain point, in its individual creations at least, the mind lies beyond scientific reach. Scientific study recognises this limit without indulging in mystical exercises or illusions. The reason for the limit is straightforward: The forms of embodiment that lead to consciousness are unique in each individual, unique to his or her body and individual history. …

Why is there a consciousness mystique — a desire for universal explanation, for conservation of consciousness as an individual experience, time without end? A reasonable answer seems to be that each consciousness depends on its unique history and embodiment. And given that a human conscious self is constructed, somewhat paradoxically, by social interactions, yet has been selected for during evolution to realise mainly the aims and satisfactions of each biological individual, it is perhaps no surprise that as individuals we want an explanation that science cannot give. It is also perhaps no surprise that we desire immortality. 

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the individual creations of the human mind are the contents of individuated consciousness: the meanings of language.  Such meanings become accessible to scientific study when they are verbally projected as instances in the form of wording (spoken and written texts).  As James Burke observed in The Day The Universe Changed:

When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hands.

A major challenge to the scientific study of the mind is a desiderative projection (a wish), rather than a cognitive projection (a thought), namely: the construal of mind as an immaterial soul that never dies.  The origin of this model can be explained as follows.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the language of mythology constitutes the oldest surviving use of metaphor — in this case, lexical metaphor — to reconstrue experience.  As argued here, the Creator God of Abrahamic mythology can be understood as standing for the meaning potential of language itself, with God's creation standing for the contents of consciousness, the construals of experience that can be projected, mentally or verbally, into semiotic existence. (This set of metaphors might be seen as a later rendering of the earlier Hindu conception of the god Vishnu as a dreamer whose dreaming creates the world.) To be clear, on this model, it is meaning potential itself that (modestly) construes itself as God.

On a model where meaning potential is reconstrued as God, the meaning potential of an individual is reconstrued as an individuation of God, a soul.  The immortality of the god is then attributed to its individuations, souls, in contradiction to the mortality of their embodiment.